2023/05/05 by Vaughn, Leona, Kiconco, Allen
paper · doi:10.58002/5zzx-sn97
The myth of African or African-descended people being innately resistant to Covid-19 emerged during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic (‘early Covid-19’) in media narratives originating in China and the Global North. This paper is based on a rapid collaborative research project which explored open-source information from the three African countries of Ghana, Kenya and South Africa to discover if, and if so how, public- and state-generated narratives of risk for preventing Covid-19 infection were influenced by this racialized myth of Black immunity to the virus. The study found that the narratives of perceived levels of the risk of contracting the virus were indeed inherently racialized and that the immunity myth was contained in widely held ‘infodemic’ narratives about innate African (Black) immunity. Moreover, race was also observed to play a significant role in local pandemic policies, their implementation and their impacts, including in narratives of risk responsibilization. The risk and prevention narratives about the virus, locally monikered as a ‘colonial virus’, illustrated a paradoxically simultaneous reinforcement of colonial imaginings of biological ‘race’ and ‘blackness’ with resistance to them. Analysing these processes of racialization in a specific time and place offers a unique insight into how racialized risk, which is inherently political and works to uphold existing inequalities of power, has impacted on African communities during this pandemic far beyond the initial myth of immunity.